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The Role of Computation in Protecting the Environment

On July 9, 2013, High school teachers and students, as well as undergraduates, were invited to attend “The Role of Computation in Protecting the Environment,” a one-day workshop co-sponsored by STORE.

The workshop featured engaging and interactive hands-on activities, many of which can be translated to the classroom and are tied to Texas and national curriculum and educational standards. Special opportunities were presented to participants, for example, examining subsurface cores at The Bureau of Economic Geology and Skyping with a researcher in the field.

Teachers and students had the opportunity to engage in discussions with university faculty and researchers on laboratory and field experiments, mathematical modeling and large-scale parallel computation as applied to the environmentally important carbon storage problem.

Build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), is a serious environmental problem facing the global community. One way to address this problem is to capture CO2from the exhaust of a power plant and inject it deep underground for storage in rock formations.

Teachers and students were able to explore the emerging interdisciplinary role of mathematics and computational science in the simulation and solution of the Grand Challenge of carbon sequestration during this one-day workshop held at The University of Texas (JJ Pickle) campus in Austin. A generous honorarium was provided to participants through the support of the National Science Foundation.

Cranfield Field

The carbon sequestration site at Cranfield Field outside of Natchez, Mississippi is a centerpiece of STORE's Research and Technology Transfer Initiative. Highlights of field trips to Cranfield include a tour of Denbury Resources' gas-separation facility, venting of CO2 from a flow line at an injection well, viewing of core of the injection and confining zone intervals of the Tuscaloosa Formation, and viewing of monitoring instrumentation designed and operated with funding from the National Energy Technology Laboratory in collaboration with Sandia Technologies, LBNL, ORNL, USGS and LLNL. Read more>>